Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Illuminati, Illuminism, & Conspiratorial Bastards

Many
years ago, I annoyed another magician. He felt, for reasons I cannot
blame him for, that I was going out of my way to mess with his life.
And so he took action.

So
one day I woke up and found a threatening image and some song lyrics
that were vaguely threatening on one of my blog's... And I did what
probably any noob magician would do: I assumed I was being cursed.
And so, in the grips of paranoia, I promptly began cursing myself.

It
was only later, when we finally made a few amends and started
chatting, that he explained that he'd never cursed me. Rather, he
allowed me to project my own internal fears and paranoia onto the
exterior images and words he'd given me. He explained, “people
normally consider the threat of violence the same as violence
itself.”

It
was a lesson in ambiguity, and how we respond to it. Oddly enough,
that lesson has also shaped my approach to various topics: we tend to
project our fears on ambiguous, ephemeral constructs that we don't
completely understand. If something pings the “Fear Meter,” it's
all too easy to get carried away and begin letting our imagination
over-crowd what is actually there.

What,
you might ask, does any of that have to do with the Illuminati, and
why do I bring it up?

Most
people know very little about the Illuminati beyond what they can
read in conspiracy circles. The ritual of the Bavarian Illuminati –
a Freemason Order dedicated to the ideals of the Enlightenment and
with potentially revolutionary aims – have been around for a few
hundred years. Despite the fact that their rituals, and manuscripts,
are actually held in Historical hands and could have been translated
at any time, they were not.

Rather,
people took the over-arching revolutionary themes, and ran with them
while simultaneously projecting their fears onto the Order. The fact
that the order was suppressed by political authorities is overlooked,
and instead it's imagined to thrive to this day in the Halls of
Worldly Power.

John
Michael Greer ended up translating the material he found
collected together, and presented a lecture and initiation ritual at
Pantheacon many years ago. What he found was an emphasis on equality
– for all people, including (despite the time at which the Bavarian
Illuminati was formed) women – rationality, and so forth. These are
the ideals that formed Enlightenment thought.

And
so a number of us ended up being members of the newly re-founded
Illuminati.

The
rituals are – like most quasi-Masonic or Masonic rituals – quite
boring. There was absolutely no nudity, certainly no sex magick, and
there was a suspicious lack of revolutionary sentiment... Largely
because to a certain degree, our country and the world has inherited
the foundations of Enlightenment thought already. While true and pure
equality does not yet exist, it is something our social systems
continue to strive for and which most liberals agree with.*

When
I recently posted the entry
on the Occulists, some of whose symbolism I've begun stealing for
my own ends, it was because of precisely what they were up to and
their methods. Hidden within the depths of their cipher-texts is the
desire to overthrow the “three-headed monster” of the Church,
State, and Aristocracy. The focal points of power and privilege which
have governed the world since time immemorial. Had they been
discovered, much like the Bavarian Illuminati were, they would not
only have been accused of sodomy (as was a common accusation against
the Freemasons of their era), but also of sedition and treason.
Recognizing that the powers that be could not be fought on
traditional terms, they instead decided to cloak themselves within
the confines of cryptographic secrecy and to keep their cherished
ideals more or less hidden.

One can only imagine whether or
not the Bavarian Illuminati would have survived if they, too, had
kept to the shadows and encoded their texts.

While I do not
hold to the entirety of Enlightenment thought, I recognize it for
what it is and I recognize how it has impacted the society we
currently live in. I do not consider “rational thought” to be the
End-All-Be-All of modes of communication, nor of modes of being.
However I consider rationality and the ability to judge things
rationally to be marks of a magicians. It is one of many ways of
viewing any given material, and of judging it without letting the
“fear complexes” and our own irrational responses from
outweighing the reality of whatis
versus what we
imagine
is going on.

In
a world of scaremongering and fear-mongering, we must fight back
(internally,
anyway) with what few methods we have left to us. Emotional intellect
and communication is wonderful – until a Black Swan event arrives,
and the world around us begins quite simply freaking out.

In
short: “some of us have set ourselves up, looking always to the Eye
of Providence
and to the fore-thought aspects of Providentia
(the relationship of which to Prometheus
should be obvious to anyone who takes the time to ponder it) rather
than becoming like the Sleepy Dormouse, or basing our assumptions on
those made by the Sleepers.”

Become
an agent of your own goddamn enlightenment. There is no other time to
do it, and the methods are available to you. You, too, can become a conspiratorial bastard and seek equality for all - but if you do so, you may want to consider keeping to the shadows. It sure as hell beats being accused of sodomy and suppressed for desiring the rights endowed to your fellow man to be enshrined in the hearts of all.

Be
seeing you,

St.
Jack Faust

Mad
Profit of Eris.

*
There are, of course, still Patriarchal Authority Figures the world
over and who pretend to be part of all manner of movements. I'm
exempting them from this discussion because they are not worthy of
consideration, beyond undermining their desires at every opportunity.

This is absolutely perfect; right in line with everything I've been feeling with regards to how others project their fears, their baggage, etc, onto those with whom they feel may be breaking the "status quo" or upsetting the boat in some way...

And a very interesting and informative history lesson to boot.

Thanks for this. I hope you don't mind if I link to it, or quote a sentence or two, when I finally complete my next blog.